Defend Truth

Opinionista

Baltimore & Me

mm

Spector settled in Johannesburg after a career as a US diplomat in Africa and East Asia. He has taught at the U. of the Witwatersrand, been a consultant for an international NGO, run a famous Johannesburg theatre and remains on its board, and been a commentator for South African and international print/broadcast/online media, in addition to writing for The Daily Maverick from day one. Post-retirement, Spector has also been a Bradlow Fellow of the SA Institute of International Affairs and a Writing Fellow of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Only half humourously, he says he learned everything he needs to know about politics from ‘Casablanca.’ Maybe he's increasingly cynical about some things, but a late Beethoven string quartet, John Coltrane’s music, and a dish of soto ayam (one of Indonesia's great culinary discoveries) will bring him close to tears.

With the latest flare-up of urban anger over yet another death of a young African American at the hands of a police force, this time in Baltimore, I recall my own memories of Baltimore – and some police brutality – to find some life lessons therein.

Forty-five years ago, the Maryland State Police assaulted me during an anti-Vietnam War/anti-Cambodian invasion protest as the cops tried to end a roadblock of a major East Coast North-South thoroughfare adjacent to the University of Maryland’s main campus. Students had poured onto that road to protest the killing of students at both Kent State University in Ohio and Orangeburg State College in South Carolina, just a short while before. Knocked down by police and given a nasty head wound as a bonus, I was summarily bundled into an ambulance and sent to a local hospital to be stitched up, instead of being arrested like dozens of other students were that afternoon.

Stitched up, the problem now was who was going to pay for my emergency medical treatment. Even before I left the emergency room, the hospital had already given me a bill – and they then mailed me another one, insisting on their $200 (around R2,500 at today’s exchange rate) for the first visit – as well as the follow-up appointment to check on the healing and remove all those stitches, courtesy of the Maryland State Police. Nearly half a century ago, that was a lot of money for a working class student who was paying his own way. And it was way more than I had in the bank, much more than I earned in a week at my various part-time jobs, and more than I could reasonably ask from friends or relatives to pay on my behalf.

Not surprisingly, the university disavowed any responsibility for the costs since my injuries happened during a student demonstration that had turned “violent”. Meanwhile, the police declined to even consider any question of liability. Their spokesman insisted to my face that the whole thing had been my fault for falling against a police cruiser that was parked on the street when the police charged the student protestors. This became a particularly trenchant, early lesson in a home truth known by generations of African Americans that police can act illegally and then dissemble about it – whenever they believe they will get away with it.

Then a kind of lightning struck. A campus newspaper editor found a picture on one of the rolls of film the paper’s photographers had taken throughout that day that showed a cop standing directly over me, wielding one of those metre-long riot batons right in his hands, perhaps a second or so after I had had been hit on the head – and with the blood already gushing outward.

Demonstrating some serious chutzpah (and just maybe a little fear about that bill for medical services), I wrote a letter to the State of Maryland’s attorney general, noting that the police who had been on duty that day (including the one who had hit me) had been operating on his direct orders, just like it said in the newspapers. They had acted unlawfully when they assaulted me, and that somebody – besides me – was going to have to pay for the medical bills I was liable for paying.

Astonishingly, a week or so later, I received a hand-written letter from the attorney general, the state’s senior law enforcement official. Although he skirted around the question of who had done what, he had enclosed a check for the full costs of my medical costs, issued from his own personal checking account. Right there I had discovered the now-popular concept of “agency”; that is, the understanding I could move the system towards justice – if “right” was on my side of the equation, along with a fairly compelling photograph. But in thinking about the recent events in Baltimore, it is clear that this feeling of agency remains something far too many others know, deep in their bones, some something well and truly far beyond them, regardless of the indignities, injuries or worse they continue to receive in life. Baltimore’s victim, Freddie Gray, is just the latest such person.

A few months later, head wounds healed and honour assuaged, in order to build up savings to pay for my next year of university, I took a job on the night shift at a steel-fabricating factory located in a really gritty industrial district of the city of Baltimore. I drove there every night from the Washington, DC suburbs – around 60 kilometres each way – in order to be on time to clock-in by 11 pm – until I could leave at 7 am, the next morning.

It was, not surprisingly, nasty, dirty, tiring work. I had to clean and then help set up the assembly lines for the factory’s various product runs. I carried loads of tools and spare parts all over that enormous factory for technicians to work with, and I hand-inspected big sheets of metal for flaws before they were cut into individual canisters for everything from lubricating oils to tinned fruit – that would be sent on to other factories throughout Baltimore. The noise in the plant was deafening and my work clothes quickly became impregnated with tiny razor-sharp slivers of metal scrap, mixed together with caked-on flux – the viscous liquid used to keep the metal cutting lathes from seizing up when they were shaping special order containers. Built back in 1917, this factory was an anchor in a thriving manufacturing sector that was still the basis for Baltimore’s economy in the early 1970s. And, besides, the pay was pretty good for a lowly university student, making all this worth the trouble.

Back then, Baltimore’s residents fairly revelled in their city’s sleeves-rolled-up, heavy-lifting, heavy-duty manufacturing persona and its key role as a major port and transhipment centre for the nation. It also had a major educational and research sector, what with world-renowned Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music and a dozen other tertiary educational institutions. The city’s people were proud of their town’s cultural and entertainment footprint that stretched back to literary famous sons like Edgar Allan Poe and HL Mencken, musicians like Eubie Blake, filmmakers like Barry Levinson and John Waters, and national sports legends such as baseball’s Babe Ruth and American football’s Johnny Unitas. But manufacturing was the city’s real muscle and sinew.

Baltimore was also a city with a checkerboard of long-established ethnic neighbourhoods and ethnic enclaves. The factory I worked in was on the edge of a downtown neighbourhood called Holland Town, perhaps in memory of some long-departed, early German or Dutch inhabitants. Current residents were still mostly white – and still thoroughly working class. Their homes were small, old, row houses constructed along the city’s streets. At the corners of each city block there usually were neighbourhood bars, “mom and pop” grocery stores, small beauty parlours, barbershops and the like, punctuated every once in a while by a storefront church. The whole area looked just like the backdrop for John Waters’ film, Hairspray.

The people who worked in that factory with me – and all the other plants nearby – came from those same modest streets. Their own fathers had probably worked in those plants too – and they knew they could count on those same factories for reliable, steady jobs for their children, their nephews, and the children of friends, whenever it came time for those in the next generation to look for fulltime work, just the way it had been for decades. But the loss of those factories, jobs and the people who worked in them has dealt Baltimore a cruel blow as there is now very little way for so many of those who remain in the city where I worked all those years ago, to allow them to get a toehold on economic advancement.

That, in turn, has left far too many at the mercy of circumstances they are unable to change, unlike my push-back against the police or my night shift job in a Baltimore factory. And all it took now was for a senseless death like that of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African American who died in police custody, to set off the spark among those without prospects or “agency” to take their anger into the streets instead. DM

Gallery

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

Become a Maverick Insider

This could have been a paywall

On another site this would have been a paywall. Maverick Insider keeps our content free for all.

Become an Insider

Every seed of hope will one day sprout.

South African citizens throughout the country are standing up for our human rights. Stay informed, connected and inspired by our weekly FREE Maverick Citizen newsletter.